Spitzer, EmperorsClubVIP & Local SEO

I know what you’re thinking – how is he going to tie these unrelated concepts together? Well, just as it took the IRS to uncover a connection between Elliot Spitzer and the Emperors Club VIP escort service, it also takes a true SEO obsessive to tie these two headline grabbers to local search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Here’s what we know:

1. Soon-to-be-former Gov. Spitzer most likely found the Emperors Club VIP website via a search engine

(not the sort of thing a Gov relies on word-of-mouth referrals for).

2. Therefore maybe we can assume that the site ranked well for some targeted terms.

3. Given all of the publicity, this URL, www.emperorsclubvip.com, now has inbound links up the yin-yang (and they should know about yin-yangs).

4. The owners of ECVIP are likely facing a very expensive legal battle and would be wise to sell any non-core assets.

5. If I were an escort service serving a different cities (it looks like ECVIP’s were London, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Vancouver, Europe & Tokyo), I would be willing to pay a fair amount for the URL and build a well-SEO’d site that targets local escort services for these cities. I imagine that you could relaunch the site with a bit of publicity and it would rank well for a lot of high value terms.

6. The site is hosted by Homestead, a subsidiary of Intuit, which hosts small business websites. If I were them I would take back ownership of the site citing a terms of service violation and provide links to my other escort service clients for a fee (but don’t forget to put a “nofollow” tag on those links right? )

7. And now here is probably the most important lesson we can learn from this incident. If your website goes down turn off your PPC campaign!